I watched part of the Tony Blair-George W. Bush news conference and was reminded of the old folk story about the turtle on a fence post. Here were two men who know that their respective places in history will be circumscribed by the course of events in Iraq. They can’t imagine how this turtle got on top of that fence post. And so of course they talked about courage and they spoke about the hard decisions that leaders must make and they spoke affirmingly of their corresponding strength of purpose.
The trouble is that for George W. Bush the war in Iraq was always meant to be nothing more than a theatrical production. It was supposed to be easy. It was never meant to be a war on terror. Iraq was nothing more than an extravaganza. And when it quickly became a civil war with a swift infusion of real terrorists Bush failed to put enough troops on the ground to manage the situation. We don’t have to wait for history to know these things.
I am certain that our nation’s current course of action is utterly wrong. No rational person inside or outside the military believes that we should keep our troops in a civil war.
But courage in this instance requires more than the social semiotics of the turtle on the fence post. Iraq is not the front line in the "war on terror"–it’s a blunder that looks and smells like imperialist occupation and the sooner the U.S. gets out the sooner we can work toward peaceful solutions for the many conflicts that are heating up across the Middle East.
Such a move will look at first like defeat. But it won’t be. History assures us of that.
Planet of the Blind 